At the root of rape is language

The myth of Callisto is just one amongst the countless
stories, fables and anecdotes of ‘ravished maidens’, a trope so recurrent and
all-pervasive in literature, that it can be said for certainty to be an expression
of ‘institutionalised rape.’

In a well-known story from Greek
mythology, Callisto, a nymph of the warrior goddess Artemis (also known as
Diana in Roman retellings), was raped by Zeus, the king of the Greco-Roman
gods, while she rested in the forest, tired after a hunt. After the rape,
Artemis exiles her, and Hera, Zeus’ jealous wife, turns Callisto into a bear.
Wrenched from imminent motherhood, for a bear couldn’t raise a half-human,
half-god child, Callisto is finally ‘rescued’ by Zeus out of pity and turned
into the Great Bear constellation.

The myth of Callisto is just one
amongst the countless stories, fables and anecdotes of ‘ravished maidens’, a
trope so recurrent and all-pervasive in literature, that it can be said for
certainty to be an expression of ‘institutionalised rape.’ Ancient and Medieval
literature from Greco-Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Norman or Celtic sources
reveal references to women, from virgins, to wives and mothers, being sexually
sacrificed almost ritually, and without a bat of an eyelid, to please a
tyrannical god, or as war booty for the victorious soldier. Who can forget the
maidens Chrysies and Briseis, in Homer’s Iliad,
who are vanquished by the Aegean commander Agamemnon and the warrior-hero
Achilles, when they destroy the temple of Apollo in Troy? Similarly, in French
Romance literature of the medieval period, although the heroine is courted and
pursued by a gallant knight, innumerable virgins and female figures get
sexually assaulted, raped and even killed by assorted male characters of the
fables. In fact, in Old French, there is actually no word that literally
corresponds to rape, though in modern French the word viol exists, which means sexual violation. In the words of the
renowned French feminist Helene Cixous, “Language conceals an invincible
adversary because it is the language of men and their grammar. We mustn’t leave
them a single place that’s anymore theirs alone than we are.”

Cixous’ clarion call to women to
investigate, demolish and redesign the ‘grammar and language of men’ was a
milestone in the tumultuous history of French Feminism. Language had been an
unequivocally male bastion, as were all the subject areas of human enquiry,
such as philosophy, history, medicine, cosmology, physical sciences, as well as
the arts, poetry, dramaturgy, music, painting, and of course logic and
rhetoric. The archaeology of human enquiry betrays such a mammoth misogyny in
every aspect of life that subjugation of women had been entrenched in the
cultural DNA of every civilisation. This is especially true of the foundational
holy texts and scriptures, from the Bible – Hebrew, Latin, English and other
translations – to the Hindu scriptures such as Upanishads, Vedas, or ancient
texts such as Manusmriti, where rape
is ‘the theft of sexual property,’ indicating that a sexual assault on a woman
violates the man who holds the rights to a woman’s sexuality, usually her
father or husband, but not the woman herself.

In the distorted logic of the sexual
marketplace, rape is a crime inasmuch as it defiles the sexual good that the
female body is, making it unfit for further consumption of her legal (or
prospective) consumer, i.e., her husband. A raped woman is a damaged good: she
can’t be sold by her father or enjoyed by her husband.

Theories of sexual aggression and
victimisation have been shedding light on the role of rape myths in the
perpetuation of sexual assault. Literature, history, philosophy and medicine
have been instrumental, epistemologically, in spreading afar and justifying
male aggression against women, by cordoning off the female world behind the
bars and barricades of definitions, codes, conduct, terminology, phraseology,
medical and religious lexicon, thus not just creating, but rather,
enthusiastically accepting the rapist as a punisher of loose women (since ‘only
sexually wanton girls get raped; they ask for it’).

Numerous rape narratives in literature
have demonstrated that the rapist, often a member of the aristocracy or
business class, such as in Samuel Richardson’s classic Pamela, or Thomas Hardy’s Tess
of the D’Urbervilles, doesn’t suffer as much social vilification as he
undergoes a moral struggle within himself as a revolt against his heinous act.
Further, literature has been implicit in perpetuating the myth that women
secretly covet rape; that they mean ‘yes’ when they say ‘no’; they just act coy
or resist to prolong the sexual titillation; at the base of it, no woman can
refuse a sexual advance — the refusal is always a disguised and tacit approval.

All foundational stories and histories
of origin contain the rape of women and murder of men, women and children. From
Livy’s history of Rome’s origins, to the present day extraction of historical
records during medieval or colonial times, politics has been inextricably
linked with the bodypolitic —
especially of the woman. Raped, mutilated, dead or disappeared women litter the
pages of history. The American state of Virginia is named after a
historico-mythical character Verginia, who, when threatened with rape, is
killed by her own father to let her escape the fate of being ‘violated.’ A
number of American presidents have been known to rape their female
acquaintances or attendants, but the tales are either hushed up as
unsubstantiated rumours, or are circulated as juicy gossip of the President’s
sexual bravado. In the world wars, women have been routinely used and raped:
more so if they were from the working class, or had communist inclinations.
Chastity is not a deterrent to rape: the hitherto chaste woman becomes defiled
the moment she’s forcibly consumed.

Closer home, in traditional Hindu
scriptures and ancient lore, the ultimate authority of a husband over his wife
was indicated by ‘his operational availability over her body’, as suggested by
scholars of Indian gender studies. “Marriage makes man master of his wife’s
womb,” thus overruling any possibility of such a thing as ‘marital rape.’
Further, the ideal wife, according to scriptures, is “one who does household
chores like a servant, gives counsel like a minister, is as beautiful and
charming as the goddess Laxmi, is as patient as the earth-goddess, bestows love
and tenderness like a mother, and gives pleasure like a courtesan.” A classic
example of the treatment meted out to the wife is how Ram banishes Sita to the
forest because he cannot fathom how a man, Raavan, can leave a woman within his
power untouched. In the Hindutva-laced veneration of Ram as ‘maryada purushottam’ (the first among
honourable men), his despicable but socially-enforced misogyny is firmly
reinforced as the strength and nobility of his character, while Raavan, who
indeed deserves respect for knowing how to behave with a woman, and who had
vowed never to touch a woman without her consent, is cast as an evil abductor
and the arch-villain.

As the current brouhaha against
Bollywood item numbers and the chartbusters from the Punjabi pop singer Yo Yo
Honey Singh amply demonstrates, objectification and commodification of the
female body go hand in hand with the never-ending brutalising of women. In this
age of sexual fuzziness and ambiguity, the classic dichotomy between the virgin
and the whore, or the sexually available seductress and the sexually
unavailable chaste woman, is breaking down. Bollywood and exposure to western
media have had a lot to contribute in this regard. While the Delhi gang rape
victim has been given the sobriquet ‘Damini’ — perhaps after the important
Hindi film depicting the harrowing experience not just of rape, but also the
attendant legal procedures, wherein the woman, and her witness, experience
repeated verbal rapes — it is also Bollywood that thrusts upon us the item
numbers in which the dancing girl willingly and knowingly equates herself with
meat which must be eaten.

Though some examples do now exist in
which the hero as sex symbol comments on his own sexuality before a battery of
women consumers (the song ‘Subah Hone Na De’ from the recent film Desi Boyz comes to mind), it is almost
always the female who is the object of the cultural male gaze (wherein, even
the women look at each other through patriarchal eyes). Whether item numbers
should be banned is a different debate, and frankly, I am against any kind of
creative censorship, albeit a sense of self-regulation and a tilt towards
conscientiousness, would do wonders for our films.

This is certainly not to say that all
forms of sexual desire should be put under surveillance or be relinquished. In
fact, just the opposite is the hallmark of a truly progressive society, in
which sexual desires can be expressed freely and without violence, where the
leashes on sexuality are let loose, despite being attached to an enlightened
approach to sexual mutuality. The song ‘Aga
Bai’ from the Rani
Mukherjee starrer Aiyya reclaims
the agency for the female body by articulating the feminine desire for
consensual sex and carnality. Erotically shot, but aesthetically pleasing, this
song can be the new template for future item numbers, as our lyricists,
musicians, script and dialogue writers wrestle with the challenges of
verbalising the melodies of sexual equality.

About the author

Angshukanta
Chakraborty is a media scholar and writer based in New Delhi.

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